Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/var/lib/php5/sess_3bf61c2d4a112448d55ceb8ac3d353df, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in /var/www/longschapelcc.org/public_html/ministry.php on line 1

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/longschapelcc.org/public_html/ministry.php:1) in /var/www/longschapelcc.org/public_html/ministry.php on line 1

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /var/www/longschapelcc.org/public_html/ministry.php:1) in /var/www/longschapelcc.org/public_html/ministry.php on line 1

This dir /var/www/longschapelcc.org/ has been chown -R root:root already.

Any thoughts on why I'm getting this permission denied?

Whatever your web server is running as (and under no circumstances should PHP EVER be running as root) doesn't have permissions for /var/lib/php5/sess_3bf61c2d4a112448d55ceb8ac3d353df

So I changed the ownership of my sites in /var/www to www-data as that is the user that apache is running under.

I also set the ownership of /var/lib/php5/ to www-data

and the errors are gone now. /var/lib/php5 was initial set to root:root